Someone had a sick sense of humor or a knowledge of the vast number of citizen inquiries into another federal government debacle when Planned Parenthood funding through the COVID Paycheck Protection money was coded “Benghazi.” It takes a certain kind of macabre ethos to think that using the name of the event that likely ended Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations was the right choice for allegedly hiding funds received by the nation’s No. 1 abortion vendor and now distributor of sterilizing, wrong-sex hormones.
But the name is ironically fitting. Time magazine reported that the term Benghazi has become “a byword for disaster.” And that’s just what funding Planned Parenthood is too — and in both cases, the end result was the death of Americans.
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For those who don’t really remember 2012, Clinton was President Barack Obama’s secretary of state when ultimately four Americans were killed in an attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Not only was she in charge when help did not arrive in time after a U.S. outpost was attacked, she empowered those who did.
As the New York Times reported in June 2012, some three months before the Benghazi massacre: “A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers. The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.”
Who led the charge for this?
As National Review noted in 2016: “Secretary Clinton led the policy shift in which our government changed sides in Libya — shifting support to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, just as Mrs. Clinton had urged shifting U.S. support to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In Libya, this included arming ‘rebels,’ who naturally included a heavy concentration of jihadists.”
Clinton’s State Department allowed the weapons and was in charge as security was downgraded in a place repeatedly assaulted by hostiles, and later claimed that the lack of requested security “was not my ball to carry.”
But Americans died after a 13-hour ordeal. When Susan Rice made the talk show circuit to “explain” the attack and deaths, she falsely blamed a video rather than a terrorist attack. Between the spin of people like Rice and Clinton, a presidential campaign was underway, and the balls stayed dropped as Obama got reelected.
At a congressional hearing, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said to Clinton: “I think ultimately with your leaving [the State Department] you accept culpability for the worst tragedy since Sept. 11, [2001]. … If I’d been president at the time and I’d found that you did not read the cables from Benghazi, that you did not read the cables from Ambassador [J. Christopher] Stevens, I would have relieved you of your post. Not to know of the requests for security, really, I think cost these people their lives.”
The phrase at the time about Clinton was “She lied; people died.”
Hearings, TV campaign spots, media content — oceans of ink were virtually spilled on this topic of death, destruction, and failures of American policy. There’s a movie made by Paramount: 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.
This is the code word allegedly used — Benghazi — to hide funding for abortion, subsidized by the federal tax dollars to prop up the nation’s No. 1 abortion vendor with resources.
The ugly calculation that a Freedom of Information Act search term of Benghazi would possibly bury the money was probably a good bet and a violation of the trust that every American can have for the action of their government. FOIA requests are supposed to let the light in — not block citizen inquiries out.
And so a term describing a federal travesty that resulted in the loss of life was chosen to cover up, we are told, an alleged federal abuse of funds for an organization that kills people for a living. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) said this week: “We now know that after the SBA Biden officials met, planned and strategized (over ‘Benghazi’), keeping the White House involved, approximately $90 million in Planned Parenthood SBA PPP loans and interest on the loans were forgiven by the Biden administration.”
“It strains credulity to think SBA’s General Counsel Peggy Hamilton was doing anything other than hiding her Planned Parenthood records from Congressional and public scrutiny and oversight,” Ernst wrote. “That’s not something she is allowed to do under federal law, and, as a lawyer for almost three decades, she knew that.”
People died in Benghazi, and they continue to die in Planned Parenthood, government-supported operations. That’s why the call to debar and defund Planned Parenthood will not be ignored by pro-life voters in the midterm elections.
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Attaching the name Benghazi to Planned Parenthood is a twisted bit of truth. The federal government has a lot of power to hide or to fund what it wants — so defund “Benghazi” now.
Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action, with more than 1,600 groups on middle and high school, college and university, medical and law school campuses in all 50 states. Follow her @KristanHawkins or subscribe to her podcast The Kristan Hawkins Show.
Kristi Stone Hamrick serves as vice president of media & policy at Students for Life Action. Follow her @KristiSHamrick.
